2nd Rape Kit Lawsuit Names More Officials

A second federal lawsuit over the Memphis Police Department’s backlog of 12,000 untested rape kits was filed last week and casts a wider net of defendants, including the current and former Memphis police directors and the current and former district attorneys general, the Memphis Daily News reports. Like the first suit, however, it seeks more information about how the backlog came to exist. Lawyers representing the three rape victims bringing the suit have their own ideas about how that happened though, suggesting that the city had no effective system to organize and preserve rape kits that were taken as well as those that were processed.